Australia's peak farm lobby group will have a new face come November, with current president Brent Finlay confirming he will not stand for re-election.

Former Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) president Peter Tuohey and current National Farmers Federation (NFF) vice president Fiona Simson have confirmed they will compete for the top job.

Ms Simson has been on the NFF board for five years, serving as vice president since November 2013.

Mr Tuohey completed his maximum four-year term as VFF president last month and has served as director on the NFF board over the same period.

Should Mr Tuohey win his bid to lead the NFF, he will be the second Victorian to serve as president of the national lobby group, following Donald McGauchie's leadership between 1994 and 1998.

"I think it's about time Victoria was represented and led up the national organisation," Mr Tuohey said.

"Victoria is a very productive agricultural state - we've got huge diversity in agricultural production.

"It's time for a Victorian."

Mrs Simson, a mixed farmer and grazier from the NSW Liverpool Plains, was elected NFF vice president in 2014.

She was the first woman to lead New South Wales' farm lobby group, after her election to the presidency in 2011, and if successful, would be the first female NFF president.

"I've now taken on a good grasp of national issues and been able to travel around Australia quite a lot, talking to farmers across the nation.

"I'm also a farmer myself, from the Liverpool Plains, very actively involved in our farm business.

"The other thing we need as farmers is skills to talk outside the farm and skills to talk to other stakeholders ... we need to bring people along and make sure that we can actually achieve some of the outcomes that agriculture so badly needs."

Australian agricultural exporters are hopeful talks with Indonesia will deliver a more consistent and open trading relationship between the two countries.

They are not holding their breath for a swift resolution, but there is still optimism that the two nations can meet an "ambitious but achievable" timeline for a broad trade agreement, as laid out by the Australian Government.

Despite its size and proximity, Indonesia is only Australia's 11th largest export market.

It remains a vital, if sometimes unpredictable, destination for Australian beef and wheat, but has been a volatile market for horticultural exporters in particular.

Recently imposed quotas have made it all but impossible for citrus producers to send fruit into Indonesia, a market which the Australian industry believes is prepared to pay a premium for their quality produce.

A Queensland company has developed world-first food technology it believes could revolutionise the global processed avocado market.

Naturo All Natural Technologies has patented a technique to stop avocados browning, without using chemicals or changing the flavour.

Agricultural engineer Jeff Hastings said his company's technology offers enormous potential to value-add to avocados, that could now be used by fast food companies and restaurants.

"The concept came out of a group of avocado growers some three years ago who wanted to do more with avocados, create more value from avocados, so I got involved in looking at options," Mr Hastings said.

"They came and left but I continued on to see if there was some way of stopping the avocadoes going brown and eventually after a bunch of experiments in my kitchen and playing around with different ideas we hit on one idea that showed some promise.

"So then we went further to commercialise it and started manufacturing machines."

The sloppy sound of gumboot's walking through mud and dark grey clouds hovering over flowerless fields — this is not the pristine scene you might expect on a rose farm.

It is the middle of winter in Kalangadoo, south east South Australia, and the last two months have brought the best rains in at least two years, leaving the paddocks at Wagner's Rose Nursery a muddy mess.

Owner Brian Wagner said the conditions had made life difficult, preventing machinery getting into the fields and forcing the team to do everything by hand, but with 190,000 plants to be shipped out this season, the show must go on, rain, hail or shine.

Apart from digging up and packaging rose plants, Mr Wagner said the nursery would plant 170,000 bush stock plants and 15,000-20,000 standard stem stock this season, in preparation for next year.

The nursery starts digging up rose plants in late April and goes through the late July or early August.

The rose nursery, which is one of Australia's biggest, grows more than 600 varieties to be trucked to garden centres around the country.

While the rain has made life difficult in recent weeks, Mr Wagner said the big injection of water would pay off in the long run.

"For us, it would be great if there was less rain, because it'd make it easier for us [digging up the rose plants]," he said.

"But I suppose in the long term, we need it. The groundwater table around here is certainly dropping.

"That's a bonus next summer when we are irrigating again.

"We rely on our groundwater, it's very important in this industry — if we didn't have it, we have no industry."